Paragraph character in URL?

Question

I just ran across this an Google App Engine article that uses that funny backwards 'P' character in some URL's (look near the top of the first code box). You know that character that your high school English teacher used to mark new paragraphs (which I've learned, thanks to Wikipedia, is called a "pilcrow").

I've never seen this in a URL. So which is it?

1. This has a standard specific meaning which is ...
2. This is a typo, it should be ...
3. This is something that somebody at Google just made up. What they might mean is ...
4. What character? I'm seeing things.

Answer 1

Escaping everything properly and dealing with divergent browser behavior is a pain: Accidental HTML entities in urls.

The odd thing in this case is that &param should not be recognized by the browser as &para and then m.

Answer 2

What happens is that the page contains the sequence &para some browsers (Chrome at least) interpret that as if it was ¶ the escape code for the symbol ¶. Funny browser behaviour, but the page should not have contained raw ampersands.

Answer 3

My shot... rendering bug.
IE - shows it
Chrome - Shows it
FireFox - Displays the correct & symbol (used in URLS+parameters)

Checked source with the 3 browsers, and they all show the & char.

Answer 4

&para is in the URL which forms part of the html escape sequence ¶, i.e. ¶. It is odd browser behavior that, given the escape sequence is not complete (missing ;), Chrome is still rendering the symbol. The escape sequence itself has just not been escaped correctly in the snippet I believe..